As a completely non-medical (non-medicinal? ;-] ) person I’ve always assumed cancer kills you by blocking some function or by “ruining” an organ by taking it over (like republicans taking over the congress) with nonfunctioning cells. Is this remotely right? Does cancer change cells, displace working with non-working, or … what?
(I guess the answer may be different for different cancers. Are all cancers, really “cancers” then? Why are they all classified that way? What’s the shared nature that unites them, and benign ones with maligning ones?)
Cancer cells are greedy little cells, starving other healthy cells by eating up all available nutrients and converting that energy into cell division. Cancerous tissue puts division into overtime; the resulting tumor grows without check, putting pressure on and crushing healthy tissue.
Eventually, some organ or organ system is starved or crushed.
And the simple mass of a tumor squeezes out other tissues - brain tumors grow until they put pressure on the brain, and so on, preventing the normal cells from doing their thing.
Whether they starve or block other organs, cancers more often kill you by another uglier means (at least as I understand things).
Cancer tumors grow big and crowd out the vascularization at their core, and when they get big enough, they die at their core and start decomposing from the center out. This is sufficiently toxic to the blood that it taxes the rest of the patient’s systems to the point of death.
Please, somebody correct me if I’m wrong - this is nasty enough it’d be better off false.
My mother died of colon cancer. She died when the cancer grew to such an extent that she could no longer process any food or get any nutrition. So she essentially starved to death. I would assume that the immediate cause of death was heart failure exacerbated by the lack of food.
My father died of pancreatic cancer (which we didn’t know he had until AFTER he died). In his case, the cancer caused blood clots to form in his lungs, one of which burst and killed him.
I saw this same question asked several years ago in a Usenet group. Somebody responded that a large percentage of cancer victims die from chemotherapy, and he clearly indicated that he wasn’t trying to be funny. I’ve thought about that statement many times since I’ve read it, and it seems to me to be very plausible. But, IANAO.
My dad lived with lung cancer for over three years, but it was fairly well contained and didn’t kill him. What did kill him was the tumor that started growing around the spinal cord, just below the skull, effectively cutting of his spine and all connection from the brain to all organs. To clarify, it wasn’t the paralysis in itself that killed him, it was the coughing reflex that didn’t reach his diaphragm, thus leading him to choke on his own phlegm.
It happened quickly, though, just under 6 weeks in hospital and with morphine to help him out in the end, really euthanizing him.
Mom had accute adult leukemia, slipped into a coma 4 months after diagnosis (after looking for it for 5 months) and dies 2 weeks later.
Dad had a shitload of it. It likely started in his hip, which honeycombed, then spread to the lungs, lymph system, liver, brain and kidneys. Diagnosis to death was 3 months. Though he, like many (maybe most?) of cancer victims ultimately died of a heart attack.
Oh, way to go on getting in a jab on Republicans in a cancer OP. :rolleyes:
My father died of lymphoma, but the actual mechanism of death was renal failure. Apparently the lymph nodes in the lower abdomen became so enlarged that they impinged on his kidneys, impairing their function so that they became unable to remove toxins from his blood.
There is no one way to die from cancer; suffice to say the cancerous cells grow out of control and use up resources until they interfere with a vital system and that’s it. To add another possibility to those already mentioned, leukemias tend to flood the blood stream with immature/non-functioning blood cells and your body can become starved of oxygen (lack of red blood cells) or leave you prone to infection (lack of white blood cells).
All cancers share the trait of a cell mutation leading to uncontrolled growth, but the effects can be widely varied depending on the cells affected. There are no benign cancers, just benign tumors.
I doubt much percentage of anyone taking chemotherapy died directly from it, but almost all forms of chemo leave you immuno-compromised and so it’s easy to get an infection that will do the job. Fighting these infections and restoring the immune system have come a long way, but it’s still a significant risk.
